If you want to understand the sole of a nation, you just have to speak to enough people to realize that everyone is basically a moderate. People want their life improved, but they don’t want crazy insane policies that swing in any direction. 

The democratic party understands this and this is why they are always looking for a centrist. They do not want to put an unelectable candidate forward. They want someone who doesn’t rock the boat and mostly continues the status quo. 

Dem contenders cannot win on boring, so they have to put foward “bold” ideas - usually too extreme for the general public who don’t want their taxes raised (Bernie) and DON’T want to be like Europe. Deep down inside America despises European socialism. If you look at the roots of the nation’s founding, we rejected being ruled by outsiders - yet this is exactly the path EU fell into. You have massive welfare state apparatus taxing the living hell out of it’s citizens - something America wishes to reject at all costs. 

This is why you see tax cuts being a popular measure constantly put forward by the Republicans. People want smaller government, less taxes, more efficiency - the exact thing Republicans often promise in their campaigns. But, even without these easy sells, they need only point out the crazy socialist policies put forward by the Dems. More welfare, more taxes, very easy to argue against these things. Naturally, what you get is a fallout of extreme ideals despite wide support among Dems (think Bernie). But head to head, these ideals are unelectable - making it easy for Reps to dump on them day in day out. Bernie would NOT have won in 2016 because of the above. America wants a reasonable centrist that looks out after OUR interests (less taxes, no overseas aid, mind our own business, grow domestic economy, no wars). Dems don’t seem to get this and just further shift theri political base to the left, alienating all of the previous centrists and soft dems who now become the centrist and shift further to the right. This is exactly what happend during this election - it is not a rejection of Harris, nor the traditional Dem values - but reject of extremes, socialist ideas and further drifting away from American interests. 

The ONLY way the dem party can recover from this is to stop their authoritarian rhetoric and shift back towards the center. Curb taxes, curb spending, basically become the center. This disarms the concerned soft dems and centrists and may shift them back to the Dem party. But… I think even that ship has already sailed. 

Just my 2 sats.